C HAPTER F IVE
J OAN W ILLIAMS AND W ILLIAM F AULKNER U NITED IN F ICTION :
T HE I DIOT -C ONNECTION G ÉRALD P RÉHER
It is difficult to adjust to the fact that we are all alone. Maybe that’s why I wrote books, to cope with this frustration.
—Jeff in a letter to Amy Joan Williams, The Wintering.1
Joan Williams’s 1971 novel, The Wintering, depicts the relationship between an aspiring young woman writer and an older established author.
Based upon Williams’s bond with William Faulkner and stemming from an idea Faulkner submitted to her in 1950,2 the book has often been used
1 Joan Williams, The Wintering (1971; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997) 100.
2 See Faulkner’s 29 September 1950 letter to Williams in Joseph Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House: 1977) 307.
Faulkner was, of course, expressing his feelings for Williams and disguised them under the veil of fiction probably because he did not want to seem too direct at that stage. The idea kept developing in his mind before Williams actually put pen to paper almost twenty years later. Faulkner felt that she should “[r]ewrite that first letter you sent me . . . This story will be a series of letters” (Ibid., 323). Even though Williams uses some letters in The Wintering, she did not write an epistolary novel; nonetheless, she did “rewrite” her first letter to Faulkner and it has been used by biographers ever since the novel appeared, thus turning their relationship into fiction.
by Faulkner biographers as a primary source on their intimate connection3 that appears to have been of an intersubjective nature.4 In The Wintering, Williams has Jeff Almoner, Faulkner’s fictional double, write in a letter that
[you] gave me back what I had to have, a belief in what I was doing. I’ve needed someone to give something to, which was not money. I was tired of that. I needed someone saying Yes, to me, and to whom I could say it in return.5
Like Almoner, Faulkner felt it was his duty to help Williams become a better writer. It might even be said that his letter to Harper’s accompanying Williams’s story “The Morning and the Evening,” wedded them in the realm of fiction writing: “As is probably obvious the enclosed was written by a student of Faulkner.”6
Of course, for a young writer from the South, the presence of Faulkner is intimidating since comments on any book published by a southern writer will be compared to his works; in Williams’s case, it was even more perilous because Faulkner was there when she really started off.7 In her letters to him, Williams mentioned the issue of influence and Faulkner told her that she should not worry too much:
Never be afraid. Never give one Goddamn about what anybody says about the work, if you know you have done it as honestly and bravely and truly as
3 See for instance Stephen B. Oates, William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist (New York: Harper and Row, 1989) or André Bleikasten, William Faulkner: Une Vie en romans (Paris: Aden, 2007).
4 I am using Gabriel Marcel’s terminology from his Être et Avoir (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1935).
5 Williams, The Wintering, 124. All the letters exchanged by Jeff and Amy, Williams’sfictional self, appear in the diegesis in italics.
6 Blotner, op. cit., 337.
7 Williams had already published a short story, “Rain Later,” in Mademoiselle after winning a writing contest but “The Morning and the Evening” and the various letters that she exchanged with Faulkner show that she took writing as a serious activity at that point. About “Rain Later,” Williams explains: “I wrote [it] without any instructions whatsoever about how to write a short story. I knew none of the things I learned later. . . I wrote instinctively and just as instinctively about the small place in Mississippi I visited” (quoted in Lisa C. Hickman, William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers, Foreword by Richard Bausch [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006] 20). In a letter to Faulkner, she writes “I want to work hard because of you” (Ibid. 25), which makes it clear that meeting him was a catalyst for her to write.
you could. Sure—some discerning person will holler Faulkner because there will be some Faulkner in it. Every writer is influenced by everything that ever touches him, from the telephone directory to God.8
As Louis D. Rubin has explained, those writing after Faulkner had to
“get out from under him” and “[f]or that reason, part of their task has been and will be that of getting away from it, gaining perspective, learning to see their experience with their own eyes.”9 Faulkner’s advice to Williams goes in the same direction and, writing about Jake, the main character in
“The Morning and the Evening,” he encourages her to
feel [her character] from inside . . . To write him properly, you must have not instruction nor criticism, but imagination, which you have to have to invent him, and observation and experience. Which you will get partly from reading the best which others have done, and from watching people, accepting everything.10
Although it is obvious that she does “feel her characters from the inside,” literary influences are palpable in Williams’s fiction—for the sake of concision, this article will only focus on Faulkner’s influence but Williams readers will also notice borrowings from Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers or, among others, Eudora Welty. As Lisa C. Hickman points out in William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers, “Joan read The Sound and the Fury [in 1949], and was swept away by the intensity of Faulkner’s novel. It was her landscape, the kind of people she knew, and the emotions she experienced.”11 Williams was undoubtedly moved by Benjy Compson and she did recognize that there was a kinship between them—which it is tempting to define as an idiot
8 Williams, “Faulkner’s Advice to a Young Writer,” Faulkner and the Short Story:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1990, eds., Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992) 260.
9 Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “The Difficulties of Being a Southern Writer Today: Or, Getting Out From Under William Faulkner,” The Journal of Southern History 29.4 (November 1963): 488.
10 Blotner, 338.
11 Hickman, 15. In a 1950 letter, Williams told Faulkner that for her The Sound and the Fury was the greatest book in the world (Hickman, 85), which probably accounts for Faulkner’s decision to entrust her with the original manuscript of the book a few years later. For a detailed account of the manuscript’s story, see Hickman, 120-122.
connection. Yet, re-reading Faulkner’s The Hamlet, she suddenly realized that “Jake is not Benjy. He’s Ike Snopes!”12
A recent collection in French,13 analyzes the figure of the idiot as liminal. In their introduction, the editors start with etymology, explaining that in Greek idios refers to a singular citizen who was quite often pictured as “extraordinary” whereas in Latin, idiotus, designates an uneducated person and it is this meaning that most people have in mind when using the term “idiot.” It is the combination of two etymologies that is used as a starting point in this collection of essays whose aim is to show that the idiot, as a literary figure, is intended to “reveal” the unforeseen reality of life.14 This article concurs with the idea in an endeavor to show that Jake, Benjy and Ike make it possible to see the darkness of the southern way of life.
Although Williams asserts that she “was not consciously thinking of characters or situations in either The Sound and the Fury or The Hamlet,”15 the aim of this article is to reflect upon literary filiations and by focusing on the relationship between Jake, Benjy and Ike to show that there is a deep thematic connection uniting them all.16 Faulkner’s response to “The Morning and the Evening” helps see how he read the story through the
12 Williams, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 1980):
65.
13 Idiots: Figures et personnages liminaires dans la littérature et les arts, edited by Véronique Cnockaert, Bertrand Gervais and Marie Scarpa (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Lorraine, 2012). Also see Frédérique Spill’s introductory chapter in L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009).
14 Ibid., 6.
15 Williams, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” op. cit., 65.
16 Other Southern women writers have pictured idiots in their fiction. Porter’s short story “He” revolves around the story of a simple-minded character and Williams once told an interviewer that Porter was her “strongest influence” (Patrick H.
Samway, “Joan Williams: Struggling Fiction Writer,” America, December 31, 1988, 545). See Porter, “He,” The Collected Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965) 49-58. The reader might also be reminded of McCullers’ mutes in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. As for Welty, she does not resort to simple-minded characters much: a “little idiot nigger” is mentioned in “The Whole World Knows” but not developed as a fully-fledged character (Stories, Essays & Memoirs, eds., Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling [New York: Library of America, 1998] 471); and in
“Asphodel,” Miss Sabina is said to have power that “reached over the whole population—white and black, men and women, children, idiots, and animals—even strangers” (Ibid., 246). Interestingly, the idiot is listed after children but before animals, suggesting that though his faculties are limited he does not hold a subhuman position and is part of the community.
prism of his own fiction while Williams’s treatment of the idiot in the novel of the same title confirms that she had learnt what Faulkner meant when he wrote that “loneliness should be a catalyst.”17
“The Morning and the Evening”:
Faulknerizing Williams?
Williams showed a draft of “The Morning and the Evening” to Faulkner some time in 1950 and, as Lisa Hickman explains, it “struck a chord with [him].”18 It focuses on Jake, a retarded mute who goes to see a movie and ends up being thrown out of the tent where it is shown because of his strange behavior. Faulkner felt there was nothing to be left out of the story but suggested that Williams “break up the idiot section into shorter paragraphs, even at times a single sentence to a paragraph, [for] it would help the effect; of his simple mental processes, his mental fumbling, his innocence. . . .”19 Only in the Atlantic Monthly printing of the story do the four sections appear; neither in Williams’s The Morning and the Evening (1961), where it became the opening chapter, nor in Pariah and Other Stories (1983), has the division been kept, even through the presence of blanks.
A look at the original version suggests that Faulkner was referring to the second section of the story (that runs from “Jake straightened up. . .”
till “. . . ‘Look at the pictures.’”) and Williams did follow the suggestion that some sentences should stand out by being made into paragraphs.
Thanks to this organization, the reader really gets a glimpse of Jake from the inside. Such isolated sentences very often refer to what Jake felt, understood or remembered. After the little girl sitting next to him has touched his face, the narrator observes: “Then he sat back, let himself feel again how the hand had felt: soft.” The next paragraph, a short sentence, reads: “Softness he understood.” This leads Jake to explore his memories:
“The dark, the movie, the people around were lost to him now, while he was remembering softness.”20 This information is only shared between the narrator and the reader, thus making the people present in the scene doubly absent from the actual action.
17 Blotner, 331.
18 Hickman, 118.
19 Faulkner quoted in Williams, “Faulkner’s Advice to a Young Writer,” 256.
20 Williams, “The Morning and the Evening,” The Atlantic Monthly (January 1952): 66.
If the first section introduces Jake as a “loony” through the townspeople’s comments about him, the other three sections take the reader into the character’s mind in order to suggest that anything he does is informed by past situations and personal explorations: “Some things he had learned, repeated things. And some things he knew instinctively, animal-like: tones, touches; whether they were kind, or not.”21 As is often the case in the first section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the narrator resorts to parataxis to “[strengthen] the impression that [the character] is at a stage between baby and young child.”22 Williams departs from Faulkner by using Jake as a focalizer and not as the narrator; she thus plays on Jake’s position in the text and, by extension, within the community. He is part of and yet outside of it, which makes him a perfect observer of its customs—since he is not equipped with an analytical mind, his thoughts are generally factual and thus neutral. Jake is made to describe the unvarnished truth of the South through what Dorrit Cohn would call
“narrated monologue,”23 a technique particularly useful here since it
“[suspends figural consciousness] on the threshold of verbalization.”24 Just like Faulkner’s Benjy, Jake is inhabited by words, by scenes he can formulate in his mind but cannot let out of his mouth.25 His mental confusion is thus transcribed in the text in order to point out the meaninglessness of social codes as regards mentally challenged individuals.
In one of his letters, Faulkner was concerned with the story’s initial title which might have been simply “Jake”:
I don’t like the title. You are writing about a human being, true. but I think the title should refer to a condition, some applicable quotation, like a child should lead them, though that is not quite right. Some word maybe, like Twilight, some tender word, or, for emphasis, some savage word or phrase.
. .26
21 Ibid., 66.
22 Ineke Bockting, Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: A Study in Psychostylistics (New York: University Press of America, 1995) 44.
23 Cohn defines “narrated monologue” as “a transformation of figural thought- language into the narrative language of third-person fiction” (Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction [1978; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983] 100).
24 Ibid., 103.
25 I am borrowing François Pitavy’s idea that Benjy is “un être de mots” (Le Bruit et la fureur de William Faulkner [Paris: Gallimard, “Foliothèque”, 2001] 61).
26 Faulkner quoted in Williams, “Faulkner’s Advice to a Young Writer,” 256.
Williams credits Faulkner with suggesting the final title—one he himself had thought of when working on The Sound and the Fury and later on when writing The Hamlet27—, “saying that the mute […] did not know the difference between the morning and the evening.”28 The choice of the same title for her debut novel can be interpreted as a tribute to Faulkner;
Williams makes use of the same kind of explanation when two characters wonder why Jake has been wandering around:
“We just seen Jake coming out of your house, Ruth Edna, when we come by.”
“Jake?” Ruth Edna said. “I wonder why?”
“’Cause you got his sewing, I reckon,” Miss Loma said.
“But he just brought it a while ago. I couldn’t have done it yet.”
“Well, he don’t know that. Jake don’t know the morning from the evening.”29
Although Williams asserts that Faulkner did not see the other chapters that eventually made it into The Morning and the Evening, the way she describes Faulkner’s idea in “Twenty Will Not Come Again” confirms the fact that for her it became a driving metaphor: “. . . he suggested ‘The Morning and the Evening’ out of Genesis, when God created day and night; because to my mute Jake, all time is the same; it doesn’t matter to him whether it’s morning or evening.”30 If, when reading the short story, the meaning of the title is not that obvious, the novel offers several possibilities which, combined, make The Morning and the Evening a universal tale about difference and loneliness. The morning refers to what can be seen as opposed to the evening when everything is darker—it is all a question of light, surface and depth, exposure and secrecy.
27 I am indebted to Jacques Pothier, who worked extensively on the drafts of The Hamlet, for this comment.
28 Faulkner quoted in Williams, “Faulkner’s Advice to a Young Writer,” 256-257.
29 Williams, The Morning and the Evening (New York: Atheneum, 1961) 83-84.
30 Williams, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” 64. Faulkner said more or less the same thing about Benjy in an interview: “To that idiot, time was not a continuation, it was an instant, there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it all is this moment, it all is [now] to him” (quoted in Bockting, Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner, 56). It is also to be noted that Williams’s final title is the same Faulkner had chosen for Ike’s love story with the cow in what was to become The Hamlet. See Jacques Pothier’s “Imagery and the Making of The Hamlet: Of Snopeses and Cows,” Faulkner in Venice, eds. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Pia Masiero Marcolin (Venezia: Marsilio, 2000) 121.
The short story plays on these terms by insisting on Jake’s emotional reactions to the film and on the notions of inside and outside that refer to his body and his surroundings: “he heard [the movie music] not with his ears, but inside him”31; “as always when something moved him, the music began to creep up inside him”32; “he felt words inside him the way he felt music”33; “he heard the singing inside him, smiling to himself”34; “With no thought left of what was inside the tent, Jake stood limply while the owner held him”35; “Alone, he began to call up words from way inside him”36;
“When he saw the little house, with one lighted window, he went up to it and looked inside.”37 Put together, these sentences show that Jake’s body becomes a liminal space, one that “[inspires] anguish and fear”38—a fact that is confirmed by the constant gaze of the owner-manager39 or the behavior of the woman who “jerked the little girl away” and took her seat.40 What is also stressed by the repetition of the adjective “inside” is that Jake has created a world of his own where he can give full vent to his feelings and knowledge: “He had known for a long time that he could sing.
Whenever he was alone he would sing, but he kept it a secret.”41 Jake keeps his song and his emotions to himself; since he is unable to speak, he expresses himself differently by moaning or by reacting physically to his surroundings. Just like Faulkner in the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury, Williams makes the situation confusing because the focalizer himself is confused42; Jake interprets everything in his own terms by taking into account his personal history. Like Benjy who initially observes a scene
31 Williams, “The Morning and the Evening,” 66.
32 Ibid., 66.
33 Ibid., 67.
34 Ibid., 68.
35 Ibid., 69.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ineke Bockting, “Haunted Borderland: Gothic Liminality in Texts of the American South,” Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays in Liminal Negotiations, eds., Jesus Benito and Ana Manzanas, Studies in Liminality and Literature 5, Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2006, 131.
39 Williams, “The Morning and the Evening,” 66.
40 Ibid., 68.
41 Ibid.
42 In an introduction to the novel, Faulkner notes that the other sections of the novel were meant “to clarify” what Benjy described in the first part of the book (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929, ed., David Minter [New York: Norton, 1994] 231).
from a specific point—“Through the fence”43—Jake rediscovers the world, his world, by looking at the movie screen. Both characters need mediation between the actual and the particular, between the abstract and the real that is hidden behind “black and white shadows”44 similar to those Jake contemplates on the movie screen.
Noticeably, whenever he feels the urge to react to what he sees, Jake feels the menacing presence of the owner-manager around him. The first sentence in the story already hinted at the man’s multiple roles:
The owner-manager (who was also ticket-seller and -taker and would have been projectionist too if labor regulations hadn’t forced him to hire a licensed one) didn’t take his first customer for a loony, and tried to charge him full admission.45
The elements within parenthesis provide inside information and make it clear that the man is greedy and ambitious and that right from the start, as suggested by the negation, he was suspicious of Jake. In a letter to Williams, Faulkner had commented about first sentences in short stories and encouraged the young writer to revise it: “You have got to write the first sentence of a story so that whoever reads it will want to read the second one.”46 He recommended that she add in parentheses “‘(and ticket- seller and -taker and everything else too, with the exception of the licensed projectionist whom labor union regulations compelled him to hire)’”
because “it established right away the proprietor’s character.”47 The Atlantic Monthly publication includes the brackets, but in the subsequent versions Williams did away with them and split the sentence into two; in both “The Morning and the Evening” (as reprinted in Pariah and Other Stories) and in the novel of the same title, the first paragraph reads:
The owner-manager was also the ticket seller and ticket taker and would have been his own projectionist, too, if labor regulations had not forced him to hire a licensed one. He did not take his first customer for a loony and tried to charge him full admission.48
43 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 3.
44 Williams, “The Morning and the Evening,” 68.
45 Ibid., 65.
46 Blotner, 327.
47 Williams, “Faulkner’s Advice to a Young Writer,” 257.
48 Williams, Pariah and Other Stories (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983) 3; Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 3.
Although the idea of accumulation remains thanks to the use of polysyndeton, the decision to have two sentences upsets the initial rhythm, making the direct cause to consequence effect Faulkner had introduced disappear. Faulkner’s meddling with the text is still noticeable considering Williams’s initial “The owner-manager did not take his first customer for a looney [sic].”49 By defining the owner-manager, the story gains in power and the character’s constant presence in the background points to him as an agent of the dark forces50 that band together against Jake in the novel to come. The opposition between the sounds outside and their translation inside Jake’s mind foreshadows another story, “The Sound of Silence,”
which was accepted by Mademoiselle but was not published until Pariah and Other Stories came out.
Short Stories in/and the Making of The Morning in the Evening
Just like “The Morning and the Evening,” “The Sound of Silence,”51 which became the third chapter in The Morning and the Evening, relies on Jake’s sensibility. Describing Jake’s discovery of his dead mother’s body,52 this chapter makes the dichotomy between inside and outside even more present. The first paragraph stands as a case in point worth quoting at length:
She was dead. He knew it was death. She did not move for a very long time while he watched, and then he knew it was death. He had loved animals and they had been taken from him, but only after he had watched a long time and they had stayed still. And she was that still, like everywhere after a summer storm. He sat, and in the way that was his, after a time he said,
“Ma. . . .”53
49 Williams, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” 64.
50 “[Jake] remembered the man who didn’t want to take his dime, and saw him looking at him and laughing. So he grinned back. But the man’s face went back into the dark” (Williams, “The Morning and the Evening,” 66).
51 The story being identical to the chapter in The Morning and the Evening, all the references are to the novel.
52 The previous chapter already foreshadowed the death of Jake’s mother by recounting how one day she found herself trapped in the “dark cool cellar in the earth” (Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 22).
53 Ibid., 44.
The focus of the sentences alternates between the mother and the son, suggesting a back and forth movement: Jake watches his mother and then comes to a conclusion. This idea is reinforced by the numerous repetitions that flesh out the fact presented in the paratactic first two sentences. The situation calls to mind George Didi-Huberman’s theory that “what we look at only has value—is only alive—in our eyes because it stares at us in the face” which he derives from James Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible” in Ulysses.54 For Jake what is “visible” is that his mother is “still”
which brings yet another image, that of dead animals; his love for his mother only filters through the adjective he associates with them. Jake’s behavior echoes Michel Foucault’s comment in Madness and Civilization that “the disturbance of his reason restored the madman to the immediate kindness of nature by a return to animality.”55 His simple frame of mind is thus exposed at the same time as it exposes him to loss and loneliness.
Likewise in the opening chapter of the book, when he sees a man stroking a girl’s hair on the screen, memories of his late beloved cow surface: “He watched the stroking . . . —soft, soft, he knew remembering Sarah Jane. He began to ache remembering Sarah Jane.”56 Faulkner’s conception of literary influence is verified here since Jake, just like Ike Snopes in The Hamlet, feels for a cow, speaks to it.57 In both cases, the mute and the cow seem apt to “understand” each other as they somehow share a common language: moaning. In addition, Sarah Jane “was the only one who would listen” while everyone else tried to hush him. Afraid that something more than just stroking the animal might be happening between Jake and the cow, his mother “would take him away”58 and never would he be able to express the depth of his feelings for the only being who really understood him. The townsmen reacted much the same way when, seeing how faithful their dogs were to them, Jake would “tell them how he wanted a dog, too.”59 Aloneness is imposed upon Jake who is forever
54 Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1991; Paris:
Les Editions de Minuit, 2001) 9, my translation.
55 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961; translated by Richard Howard; New York: Random House, 1979) 75.
56 Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 16.
57 Faulkner, Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, 1940, 1957, 1959, Introduction by George Garrett (New York: Modern Library, 1994) 160. Unlike Faulkner, though, Williams does not go as far as using an animal as focalizer.
58 Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 16.
59 Ibid., 12.
misunderstood; he watches other people’s happiness without being able to share in it.
All Jake seems to “know” is loss and, like Faulkner, it seems that Williams is “interested in the relationship of the idiot to the world that he [is] in but would never be able to cope with and just where could he get the tenderness, the help, to shield his innocence.”60 The animal world offers itself as a friendlier place for such characters. In The Hamlet, it is only after a long description of Ike and his “female” other, that the identity of the couple is eventually revealed: the reader first finds out that the unnamed he in the text “[sees] nothing but the cow”61 before Ike attempts to pronounce his name without much success.62 The order in which the characters’ identity appears is of prime importance since it suggests both an origin and a destination: the cow makes it possible for Ike to name himself partly because he has found his true self in that unusual love.63
Unfortunately for Williams’s Jake, intimate unity is never achieved and Jake is unable to name himself: the sounds that come out of his mouth, though they are meaningful to him and to the reader who has access to his thoughts, never signify anything for the members of the community.
Because they do not understand, some men mock Jake saying “‘You ain’t crazy, are you, Jake?’” and, since he cannot reply, others do it for him:
“‘Naw, but you ain’t far from it are you, Jake?’”64 Joan Williams has explained that her story “was sparked by a retarded man in my grandmother’s town. People teased him by saying ‘You’re not crazy, are you?’ And he’d reply, ‘Naw. But me ain’t far from it.’ How, I wanted to know, did people not know his feelings were hurt?”65 Contrary to Jake who cannot respond and does not seem to take any notice of what is being said about him, the man in Williams’s recollection can speak and he plays along. By presenting the world through innocent eyes, Williams reveals the violence of human nature and paradoxically speaks through her mute character. Talking about The Sound and the Fury, she once confessed:
“what had moved me in [Benjy’s section] was his inarticulateness, because
60 Faulkner quoted in Bockting, Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner, 49.
61 Faulkner, Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, 160.
62 Ibid., 161.
63 For a detailed analysis of this scene, see Frédérique Spill, L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009) 161-164.
64 Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 49.
65 Williams, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” 64.
I felt it to be my own”66—with The Morning and the Evening, she uses a protagonist who occupies the center from the margin.67
After his mother’s death, Jake fails to formulate his inner pain in words; he seeks comfort by joining the chickens in the yard, picks up one,
“[holds] its soft yellow roundness close to him […]. And he [tries] to tell the animal in great dry sobs, but he knew no words for loss.”68 Frédérique Spill has shown that “if he is unable to speak, the idiot is nonetheless equipped with a voice.”69 Focusing on quotations drawn from The Sound and the Fury, she aptly demonstrates that Benjy’s moaning could be understood as an illustration of the title and of the impossibility of formulating the inacceptable. Indeed, “moaning” and “mourning” seem to go hand in hand as the odd conversation between Caddy and Frony in the Benjy section of the novel suggests70; paronomasia is brought into play to emphasize the characters’ difficulty communicating but it is also implied that for Benjy “moaning” and “mourning” sound the same and are therefore equivalent—a conclusion that Joan Williams might have reached as well when she designed Jake.
The oxymoronic title of Williams’s story, “The Sound of Silence,”
seems to introduce a totally different perspective from Faulkner’s. After Jake’s discovery, silence imposes itself: “[his mother] did not answer. She had not answered all morning. When he opened his eyes to daytime, for the first time in the forty years of his life he had not heard her in the house.”71 The use of negations together with the idea of a new day beginning announces the future that lies ahead and the human loneliness Jake will experience from that point onwards. When the man who brings the ice appears—another symbol of the coldness that has set in and will continue to develop as the body of Jake’s mother is taken away—, all the references to silence and sounds create an oppressive atmosphere: “In the silence afterward, Jake could hear the man’s heavy breathing”; “Jake could hear the alarm clock ticking in there. Then he could hear the heavy steps of the man.”72 The narrator places the emphasis on actions that are connected to
66 Ibid., 65.
67 François Pitavy sees the idiot as the “organization principle” in The Hamlet but he notes that in The Sound and the Fury everything revolves around Caddy, not around Benjy (“Idiotie et idéalisme: Réflexion sur l’idiot faulknérien,” Études anglaises 35.4 [October-December 1982]: 414).
68 Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 45.
69 Spill, 55, my translation.
70 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 24.
71 Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 44.
72 Ibid., 55.
life (“breathing”) and time (reference to the clock) but also on the heaviness of the situation, which filters through the portrayal of the intruder. The paratactic style gives the text a specific rhythm that mirrors the progression of the man towards the house; it is as if a film were playing in Jake’s mind, diverting his attention from what is really at stake. He starts picturing the scene that leads to the man’s discovery of his mother’s lifeless body, focusing on the emptiness that can be felt in the landscape:
Then the man was on the front porch. He heard the door slam behind him.
And he knew how it would look: the empty porch, the stilled swing, ahead the empty road and quiet flat land; and the field, still too, rising in the distance to a road where you could see the white steeple of the church. He thought he heard a bird sing, and he could feel the warmth of the day flush on his face as he knew the man could; sweat stood out on his forehead.
Presently he heard the man open the door to re-enter the house, and he stood up and went down the hall, meaning neither to be quiet nor to make noise, but the man did not hear him. He was in her room, bending over the bed. Jake stood outside the door, watching. He heard the man’s heavy intake of breath, watched as he held her arm a moment, then let it fall quickly. He drew the sheet up over her face.73
The house soon fills with people who are concerned with Jake’s situation. After his mother’s body is taken away, the women see to it that Jake gets something to eat but as evening is drawing near, everyone is heading home, leaving Jake alone. Once again, it is the quietness of the outside that attracts Jake’s attention74 while inside the clock is still ticking, making the passage of time more difficult to bear: “in the silence of the house he heard only the clock in the bedroom and the sound of his own breathing. He was alone and he knew that.”75 The “sound of silence” is what defines Jake’s life in the early days following his mother’s passing; it constitutes what Julia Kristeva would call “the imaginary or symbolic level”76 and makes it possible for Jake to recover his mother and deny his loss. The narrator insists on the fact that the “sounds” that can be heard do
73 Ibid., 55-56.
74 Ibid., 64.
75 Ibid., 65. Williams uses the same kind of imagery in “No Love for the Lonely,” a short story which focuses on other characters present in the novel. It describes the effects of Ruth Edna’s death on her brother who, just like Jake, finds himself alone and helpless: “[h]e tried to hear in the silence that welcomed him an echo, a voice from the past, tried to make his memories bring the house alive, but he could not”
(Williams, Pariah and Other Stories, 73).
76 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987; translated by Leon Roudiez; New York: Columbia, 1992) 40.
not constitute any act of speech, instead, they refer to Jake’s “own breathing” or to his “own noise”—as though he were trying to fill up the emptiness that his mother’s death had left by affirming his presence. His reaction illustrates Kristeva’s theory of the “impossible mourning for the maternal object”77 for Jake never severed his bond with his mother and he never entered language. The symbolic refuge Jake builds for himself soon wears out and his sounds no longer fill the surrounding silence. One night, the nature of his estrangement comes to the surface:
He lay awake as the night and its silence deepened. He had always known silence, but suddenly he was afraid of it. He sat up, startled, and with one terrified, but reassuring cry, called out at the top of his lungs, telling them all, telling everybody, the one thing in the world he did know fully: that as deep as his own silence was, it was nowhere near so deep as hers.78
Listening to the sounds from the outside, to fill the emptiness and the silence inside him, has proved unsuccessful. The different stages Jake goes through in this chapter illustrate what Freud has suggested in “Mourning and Melancholia”: the completion of the mourning process is not possible if the subject does not go through a period of melancholia.79 The fact that silence is associated with both the night and the mother seems to indicate the darkness that is now coloring Jake’s thoughts; the absence of a referent for the pronouns “hers” confirms that his mourning is now over, an element that is confirmed in the rest of the novel from which the mother—
or memories of her—are totally absent.
Critics who exclusively focused on Williams’s relationship with Faulkner caused her work to be forgotten. Faulkner scholars recognize her name but not many have looked into her fiction. A close study of Williams’s early works reveals that long before the publication of the semi-autobiographical novel, The Wintering, the special bond she shared with William Faulkner could be felt in her choice of a retarded character whose predicament resembles those of Benjy Compson and Ike Snopes very closely. The Morning and the Evening might be read as a tribute to a mentor who, in their early exchanges, reminded Williams that “the point of writing […] was to make something passionate and moving and true.”80
77 Ibid., 9.
78 Williams, The Morning and the Evening, 76.
79 See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, translated by Joan Riviere, General Psychological Theory, ed., Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963) 164- 179.
80 Williams, “Twenty Will Not Come Again,” 64; Blotner, 297.
One should hope that readers will soon discover what Faulkner meant when he classified Williams’s first published story (“Rain Later”) in that category. Although Williams dedicated her sole short story collection to Faulkner, the rare interviews that focus on her works and not on her personal life do not include any reference to her mentor: she obviously wanted to do away with him—maybe because her writing is ample proof of Faulkner’s lasting presence? The idiot-connection is the best evidence.
Works Cited
Primary SourcesFaulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. Ed. David Minter. New York: Norton, 1994.
—. Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion. 1940, 1957, 1959.
Introduction by George Garrett. New York: Modern Library, 1994.
Williams, Joan. “The Morning and the Evening.” The Atlantic Monthly (January 1952): 65-69.
—. The Morning and the Evening. New York: Atheneum, 1961.
—. “Twenty Will Not Come Again.” The Atlantic Monthly (May 1980):
58-65.
—. The Wintering. 1971. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
—. Pariah and Other Stories. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983.
—. “Faulkner’s Advice to a Young Writer.” Faulkner and the Short Story:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1990. Eds. Evans Harrington and Ann J.
Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. 253-262.
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Bleikasten, André. William Faulkner: Une Vie en romans. Paris: Aden, 2007.
Blotner, Joseph, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. New York:
Random House: 1977.
Bockting, Ineke. Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: A Study in Psychostylistics. New York: University Press of America, 1995.
—. “Haunted Borderland: Gothic Liminality in Texts of the American South.” Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays in Liminal Negotiations.
Eds. Jesus Benito and Ana Manzanas. Studies in Liminality and Literature 5. Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2006. 39-54.
Cnockaert, Véronique, Bertrand Gervais and Marie Scarpa, eds. Idiots:
Figures et personnages liminaires dans la littérature et les arts. Nancy:
Presses Universitaires de Lorraine, 2012.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. 1978. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. 1991.
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Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1961. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
Random House, 1979.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Translated by Joan Riviere. General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff. New York:
Collier, 1963. 164-179.
Hickman, Lisa C. William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers. Foreword by Richard Bausch. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. 1987. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia, 1992.
Marcel, Gabriel. Être et Avoir. Paris: Editions Aubier, 1935.
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Pitavy, François. “Idiotie et idéalisme: Réflexion sur l’idiot faulknérien.”
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—. Le Bruit et la fureur de William Faulkner. Paris: Gallimard,
“Foliothèque”, 2001.
Pothier, Jacques. “Imagery and the Making of The Hamlet: Of Snopeses and Cows.” Faulkner in Venice. Eds. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Pia Masiero Marcolin. Venezia: Marsilio, 2000. 113-127.
Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965.
Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “The Difficulties of Being a Southern Writer Today:
Or, Getting Out From Under William Faulkner.” The Journal of Southern History 29.4 (November 1963): 486-494.
Samway, Patrick H. “Joan Williams: Struggling Fiction Writer.” America, December 31, 1988, 544-545, 549.
Spill, Frédérique. L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner. Paris:
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